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Waterpower: Politics and the Geography of Water ProvisionJohn Agnewa

a Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles

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PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

Waterpower: Politics and the Geography of WaterProvision

John Agnew

Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles

Access to potable water is frequently said to be the defining world crisis of the twenty-first century. The argumentis usually framed in terms of either direct environmental constraints or various totalistic views of how “thepolitical” determines outcomes. There is little or no scope for the agency of practical politics. Both physical andhuman geographers tend to be dismissive of the possibilities of democratic politics ever resolving “crises” such asthose of the geography of water provision, in part because of views of scientific expertise that devalue popularparticipation in decisions about “technical” matters such as water quality and distribution. Such dismissal also hasmuch to do with a more generalized denigration of politics. Politics (the art of political deliberation, negotiation,and compromise) needs defending against its critics and many of its practitioners. Showing how politics is atwork around the world in managing water problems and identifying the challenges that water problems pose forpolitics provides a retort to those who can only envisage inevitable destruction or a totalistic political panaceaas the outcomes of “the crisis of the century.” Key Words: determinism, political agency, politics, waterpower.

Con frecuencia se escucha la afirmacion de que el acceso al agua potable define la crisis mundial del siglo XXI.Usualmente se presenta el argumento, bien en terminos de constrenimientos ambientales directos, o en formade una variedad de enfoques sobre como “lo polıtico” determina los resultados. Sobre el particular hay muy pocoambito, o ninguno, para la operacion de polıticas practicas. Tanto los geografos fısicos como los humanos tiendena ser directos en descartar las posibilidades de polıticas democraticas como opcion para resolver “crisis” del tipode la geografıa del aprovisionamiento de agua, en parte debido a la apreciacion que se tiene de la experticiacientıfica que resta valor a la participacion popular en decisiones sobre materias “tecnicas,” como las de calidady distribucion del agua. Tal descarte tiene tambien mucho que ver con una muy generalizada denigracion de lapolıtica. La polıtica (esto es, el arte de la deliberacion, negociacion y compromiso polıticos) necesita defendersede sus crıticos y de muchos de sus practicantes. El mostrar como se desempena la polıtica alrededor del mundoen el manejo de problemas del agua, y en la identificacion de los retos que plantean los problemas del agua ala polıtica, da una respuesta tajante a quienes unicamente columbran destruccion inevitable o una panacea depolıticas totalitarias como productos de “la crisis del siglo.” Palabras clave: determinismo, agencia polıtica, polıtica,energıa hidraulica.

In his dramatic but detailed and informative chron-icle of the damming of the Colorado River andthe future of water in the American West, James

Lawrence Powell, one of the speakers at the 2009 Asso-ciation of American Geographers (AAG) presidentialplenary in Las Vegas, quoted the advice that Woody

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(3) 2011, pp. 1–14 C© 2011 by Association of American GeographersPublished by Taylor & Francis, LLC.

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2 Agnew

Allen gave to some graduating students: “Graduates, asyou embark on your life’s journey, you will come to afork in the road. The way to the left leads to inevitabledestruction. The one to the right leads to despair andmisery. Choose wisely” (Powell 2008, 4). Powell seesthese two dire options as what the future holds for thedams on the Colorado River and, more broadly, forthe sustainability of water provision in the U.S. West.Powell’s joke is a pretty good summary of how the globalproblem of water provision is seen by many commen-tators, however. Not only is the overall prognosis ofthe water problem overwhelmingly deterministic andnegative—there is no way out beyond accepting ourfate—but the conception of politics implicitly adoptedis similarly deterministic: Whatever is decided is thedirect result of incipient environmental collapse, a con-spiracy of economic interests, or a zero-sum view of thepolitical in which there are always clear winners andlosers, and the winners invariably take all.

In many accounts, water will likely be the definingworld crisis of the twenty-first century (e.g., Chartresand Varma 2010). My main purpose today at this venuein the U.S. capital is to make two general points relativeto access to water by using examples from such places asCalifornia and the larger region served by the ColoradoRiver, the American Great Lakes region, the MiddleEast, China, and the Himalaya region: first, that thewater problem is predominantly a political one in whichdemocratic politics can in fact work to achieve out-comes other than, as Woody Allen put it, a choice be-tween destruction and despair; and second, that we havetrouble recognizing this dilemma because we have viewsabout politics, and not just in relation to water provi-sion, that either subordinate it to various natural or eco-nomic forces or trivialize it in a populist vein as corrupt,venal, and compromised. The word compromise is seenin a particularly negative light. “All or nothing” is theleitmotif of most of what goes for what politics shouldbe. The possibilities of actual political processes, formaland informal, excite limited interest. Self-definedradicals and conservatives alike passively wait for theirvarious “end times.” Too often the attitude is this: “If Idon’t get everything, then I’ll take nothing.” In a fieldlong seduced by determinisms of various sorts, politicsoffers the possibility of thinking and acting in such away that it can actually change how the world works.

By analogy to the case of water, the Copenhagen cli-mate summit of December 2009 provides an instructiveexample of how addressing politics as a process can leadto a better understanding of how the world came to thepresent impasse and of how it is possible to move beyond

it. Widely reported in the media as a “failure,” becausethere was no final binding legal agreement or treatyamong all parties, and insufficient money was pledgedby rich governments to entice poorer ones into commit-ting to various emission reduction goals, the process il-lustrates instead that politics is the solution because theoverall problem is political rather than natural or eco-nomic. Reducing emissions to manage climate changemust reflect the geopolitics of global industrialization,but it must also involve the interests and identities atstake in any sort of global resolution. In other words,the politics of climate change is not simply about theestimates of emissions and their impact or that winnersand losers are preordained. Neither is it about somesimple technical fix such as taxing carbon. It is abouttrying to manage multiple and evolving interests andidentities in a pluralistic world in which no one interestor identity is necessarily privileged a priori.

As clumsy as the United Nations (UN)-based pro-cess obviously was, all manner of interests and identitieswere represented, even if some nongovermental orga-nizations (NGOs) and indigenous groups rightly sawthemselves as sidelined. After all, the UN is still an or-ganization of states, not a global social forum. Perhapsother forums for dealing with the politics of climatechange are needed. Nevertheless, the Copenhagen dis-cussions were not a complete bust. First of all, the finaloutcome of the Copenhagen Summit recognized theextent to which, assuming that human-induced globalwarming is in fact well under way, there is still rea-sonable disagreement about its speed and geographi-cal impacts. Reflecting this disagreement, the UnitedStates and the biggest developing countries acknowl-edged that they all must be involved in any sort of so-lution. In addition, a deal was struck on deforestation,and serious money was committed to encouraging thewidespread adoption of sustainable technologies. Un-derstanding the politics involved in a process such asthis is a vital part of seeing how global climate changeis interpreted differently by different parties and whatcan be done collectively to address it. The full range ofinterests and identities at stake is not simply made upof “science” and its uncertainties (e.g., Parkinson 2010;Schiermeier 2010).

Putting Politics into the Geographyof Water Provision

Attention to politics provides a way of mediat-ing between the arguments and the evidence about


Waterpower: Politics and the Geography of Water Provision 3

the physical geography of water, on the one hand,and the workings of socioeconomic and administrativeinstitutions that manage and provide human access tothat water on the other. The point is not to reject anyof these research activities but to suggest a relationshipamong them that challenges the conventional deter-ministic premises. The approach I am proposing heretransgresses the boundaries typically imposed aroundthe two positions of physical and human geography,given that “politics” is frequently put into a box sepa-rate from all other considerations. This separating outof politics reflects both the view of science as neces-sarily untainted by politics and the view of politics assomething necessarily artful and therefore disdainful.

The first was problematic long before Thomas Kuhn(1996) pointed out how scientific theories and protocolsreflect all sorts of social and political influences as well astentative objective truths. The problem is the certitudeand hubris of an abstract “science” that claims to tran-scend such influences rather than the skeptical imagi-nation of practicing scientists. From the metaphors usedto describe observations about human behavior to theagenda-setting activities of governments, science is per-meated by assumptions with political roots. One goodexample is the wholesale import into a popular strandof evolutionary biology from liberal political economyof the metaphor of an organism’s or a gene’s “calculus”of costs and benefits (Harman 2010). Now-discreditedideas about multiple separate biological races with theirobvious political origins and consequences are another.Of course, this doesn’t mean that science is all madeup or simply socially constructed, only that access tothe world as such is invariably mediated by all man-ner of social and political influences, including theoriesimported from other fields (Longino 2001). Moreover,uncertainty in the face of unpredictability is such aperennial feature of both natural and human worldsthat whatever goes for the conventional wisdom atany particular moment in time is always subject tolater revision or rejection. As Tony Judt (2009, 96)observed with respect to some of the political uses towhich scientific certitude was put in the last century, “Ifwe have learned nothing else from the twentieth cen-tury, we should at least have grasped that the more per-fect the answer, the more terrifying the consequences.Imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circum-stances are the best that we can hope for, and probablyall we should seek.” All-or-nothing policies based onscientific certitude often lead to a vale of tears whenwe fail to note the necessary tentativeness of scientificconclusions in water research or in any other area

We live in an era when, inside and outside ofacademia, democratic politics is seen in a dim light,but if the claim to certitude that afflicts some claims tothe mantle of science is part of the reason for system-atically ignoring politics—we know what the problemis and if you do what we say it will be solved—themore pernicious is the widespread denigration of pol-itics itself. Once terms such as public scrutiny, activeparticipation, deliberation, and accountability had anarray of largely positive connotations, but politics hasnow become synonymous with duplicity, inefficiency,surveillance, and corruption. I can’t possibly cover allthe reasons for this transformation. Increased knowl-edge about the wheeling and dealing aspects of politicsand its framing in muck-raking terms is certainly partof it (Hay 2007), but broader influences—such as theview that all politics is “fixed” to favor some classesand groups, that markets invariably work better thanpolitical institutions, and that political attitudes andinterests are simply reflections of structural forces suchas global north–south divisions—are also important.From a resurgent communitarianism, in which every-one is supposed to agree about most everything, on oneside, to that economism that reads politics simply asderiving from structural economic interests, and theworship of a science beyond scrutiny, on others, the“democratic individualism” of politics is seen as inher-ently problematic. It either interferes in the rationalmanagement of society or is the source of social conflictand the inability to solve public problems (see Callon,Lascoumes, and Barthe 2009; Ranciere 2009). To an ar-ray of commentators, the fact that politics has evolvedand expanded over centuries, particularly as a result ofefforts to enlarge popular participation associated withthe term democracy, and provides tools for resolvingconflicts that otherwise remain intractable and can leadto violent confrontation no longer seems very impor-tant. Yet, as Bernard Crick (1993, 141) has argued inits defense, “Politics is not just a necessary evil; it is arealistic good.”

Representing the World Geographyof Water Provision

The geography of water provision is frequently rep-resented through a bifocal lens from the distance andthen close up. The distant view is of a world as a wholein which fresh water availability is mapped against wa-ter consumption. The close-up view is of regional andlocal variation within countries with respect to water


4 Agnew

Figure 1. World water resources. Thesize of each territory indicates theannual volume of naturally occur-ring fresh water available for humanuse, 2003. Source: Worldmapper. c©Copyright SASI Group (University ofSheffield).

sources relative to consumption. In each case, water,which is ironically the most fluid of substances, is fixedin place. Cartographically, the distant view of wateris well illustrated in Dorling, Newman, and Barford’s(2008) The Atlas of the Real World, specifically Maps 46and 48 (Figures 1 and 2). The first of these shows waterresources across the world political map to demonstratethe annual volume of naturally occurring fresh wateravailable for human use by national territory. Not sur-prisingly, those territories with the highest rainfall ap-pear the largest on the map. Their water resources arethe most readily replenished on a regular basis.

The second map shows water use. Here the size ofeach national territory is proportional to its total an-nual water consumption. The three largest countries bypopulation size—China, India, and the United States—use the largest amounts. In relative terms, however, wa-ter use per person in the United States is about triplethat in either China or India. Recall from the previous

map that in Central Africa, a part of the world withrelatively good water resources, consumption is onlyabout 2 percent of that of the average American. Theper capita differences are largely a function of relativepopulation sizes, differences in capacity to tap ground-water and distribute water to consumers, and overallrate of use relative to availability. The typical gener-alizations drawn from comparing these maps are thatthe world’s population is not distributed to match theworld’s water resources, that there are dramatic differ-ences in ability to exploit available water resources, and,thus, that there is a significant human water deficit ona world scale.

The picture of water “haves” and “have-nots” is alsousually regarded as characteristic of other geographicalscales. Within the territorial borders of the UnitedStates, for example, water resources have increasinglygone to the parts of the country with growing pop-ulations and water deficits. So, even as overall water

Figure 2. World water use. The sizeof each territory is proportional to itstotal annual water use, 2003. Source:Worldmapper. c© Copyright SASIGroup (University of Sheffield).



use in the United States declined between 1980 and2000 (mainly because of diminished manufacturingindustry), water use spiked in the South and Southwest,mainly through tapping local groundwater, but alsoby importing water. Just as on the global scale, withwater-rich and water-poor regions, nationally water isincreasingly central and critical to the geographicaldistribution of the costs and benefits of economic andpopulation growth. As some regions gain, others areseen as losing. If to some water-rich regions, “it’s ourwater,” to other regions that water is increasingly inplay by means of massive projects planned to reallocatewater over vast distances. Books with titles like Un-quenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to Do AboutIt (Glennon 2009), When the Rivers Run Dry (Pearce2006), and The Great Lakes Water Wars (Annin 2006)suggest that conflict over access to fresh water can nolonger be deferred, for as the readily accessible sourcesare used and degraded, conflicts will sharpen and be-come violent. Climate change promises to make currentredistributive arrangements, such as the Colorado RiverCompact, increasingly irrelevant to water provision inthe American West as mountain snowpack declines.

According to all these accounts, then, water will bethe defining crisis of the twenty-first century, not be-cause of the problematic geography of water provisionalone but especially because of its terrifying intractabil-ity. The crisis motif, rather than examining the politicaland social production of water provision, emphasizes thephysical side of access and imagines imminent collapse(Linton 2010). This apocalyptic perspective is redolentof the early Cold War view in America that the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union would be unlikely everto negotiate successfully about, for example, nuclearweapons. We now know this scenario turned out to befalse (Giddens 2009). This is just one example of a sig-nificant precedent behind political resolution of whatnow might appear to be intractable.

In the dualist perspective, therefore, the geographyof water provision seems increasingly intractable. Bothglobally and nationally, patterns of resource availabilityand exploitation no longer match. Only through someprocess of radically more efficient management—for ex-ample, pricing water to reflect its scarcity or reversingpopulation movement to water deficit regions—can theproblem possibly be resolved. In this perspective, wateris tied irrevocably to place. From the first, the need tomove it elsewhere is seen as the source of the crisis. Yet,water is not a simple “possession” of the places whereit exists or flows. Arguably, precipitation, the ultimatesource of all fresh water, is a global public good. How

to distribute it can be decided politically, through ne-gotiation and trade-offs, yet typically this is not how ithas been seen. Water is itself often given power ratherthan the people (and their institutions and struggles)that presumably control its provision. How has wateracquired this autonomous “power”?

Water Power: EnvironmentallyDeterminist Water Stories

Perhaps the classic story empowering water is thatof Karl Wittfogel in his Oriental Despotism (1957),which sees the weighty but mobile character of wateras mandating centralized or despotic control overwaterworks and leading to the associated hydraulic andstationary character of so-called Oriental societies. Thislogic continues to inspire much general writing of anenvironmentally determinist character about how therise and fall of civilizations is all about which one con-trols the water (e.g., Solomon 2010). More specifically,many of the stories about understanding the geographyof water provision tend to give power to water itself inone of three different ways so that not only practicalpolitics but also any abstract conception of the politicalas guiding human action is eclipsed. In the first kind ofnarrative, water gains power as a policy instrument in ageographical development strategy that represents wa-ter as a fixed local resource. The presumption here is thatlocally available water is a lever used by a governmentor other agency as an instrument of localized power.Rather like oil, water is a geographically specific “ad-vantage” that naturally accrues to some places but notto others. From this perspective, and usually unlike oil,water is defined as an intrinsic feature of fixed ecosys-tems. To Annin (2006), for example, the Great Lakesare an aquatic bounty bequeathed to the surroundingarea by the retreating glaciers; in contrast, he thinksof the Aral Sea in Central Asia as a stark reminder ofwhat can happen when such a bounty is abused for thebenefit of those beyond its immediate shores.

The second story assumes that water is an independentforce in geopolitical conflict. Conflicting state claimsover water sources take shape as simply yet anotheremerging genre of resource-based conflict, in whichextended drought or economic development in somecountries will inevitably lead to efforts at hijackingwater from elsewhere. In a recent account of such ascenario, Kenneth Pomeranz (2009) argued that theGreat Himalayan Watershed between India and China(and Southeast Asia) seems set to become an emerging


6 Agnew

conflict zone because of the incompatibility betweenambitious national economic growth goals, on the onehand, and inadequate local water supplies on the other.This scenario becomes all too plausible when one readsnewspaper reports from India about suicides by drought-affected farmers or about massive water shortages innorthern China, a region that grows three fifths of theentire country’s crops and houses two fifths of its pop-ulation but receives only one fifth as much rain as therest of the country. The implicit message of the story isthat conditions such as these lead inevitably to a geopo-litical denouement as water scarcity forces the hand ofthe various geopolitical actors.

The third story that is woven is of water as a partof the larger drama of economic and urban growth versusnature, with water as an instrumental ally of elites ver-sus its putative natural state of being. In this construc-tion, powerful local interests, such as the booster/growthcoalitions of Los Angeles or Las Vegas, for example,have diverted water from far away to build unnatu-ral and unsustainable desert cities. Popularized in thefilm Chinatown, the history of Los Angeles is reducedto a simple fable about the local elite gouging waterfrom distant valleys to fuel the development of thecity. Much of the extensive dystopian literature onLos Angeles tends to see the harvesting of water asa violation of nature. More substantively, however, asWilliam Kahrl (1982) showed in his fascinating his-tory of the conflict over Los Angeles’s water supply inthe Owens Valley, “panic” over the possibility of wa-ter shortfalls has been a discursive strategy inheritedfrom William Mulholland, one of the three founders ofthe L.A. Owens Valley Aqueduct, as a way of mobiliz-ing “water” as the Achilles heel of proposals to moveLos Angeles politics into non-water-intensive concep-tions of its future. Unfortunately, relating the simplebut dramatic image of water as the very foundation ofthe city undermines the possibility of exploring the his-torical grounding of water politics. Water politics restsin the complex intersection of institutional, economic,and ideological conditions at national, state, and lo-cal levels that have actually made the flow of waterpossible.

In a desert, of course, water can be imaginedmetaphorically as speaking, but to give water in thesenarratives an autonomous power that obscures the hu-man actors mediating its impact is an example of a cate-gory mistake: endowing a substance in itself with eitheran intentionality or a causality of which it is incapable.Across all three stories, water is accorded an indepen-dent causal power that eliminates politics in any sense

of deliberation, choice, decision making, negotiation,and accountability.

Romancing the Political in PoliticalGeography

How then does “the political” figure in contempo-rary political geography as it could be applied to waterprovision? Even if we avoid empowering water per se,what repertoire of understandings of the political mightbe available for deployment? Typically, unfortunately,they all tend to posit panaceas: abstract conceptions ofthe character of the political. By my definition, how-ever, politics is the practical process of working andcompromising across competing and antagonistic posi-tions, not endorsing panaceas. I would like to postulatethat perhaps six different ways of defining or confin-ing the political currently predominate. In all of these,whatever their other merits, politics is diminished soas to identify an essential political that eliminates se-rious consideration of practical politics. One is thatof the Platonic or scientist–observer who has the req-uisite expertise and knows exactly what needs to bedone. As I have already claimed, the messiness of pol-itics contrasts with the seeming certainty of scientificknowledge, which usually comes across as a type of bu-reaucratic managerialism. Much of what goes for con-ventional geopolitical analysis takes this approach, asdoes much of so-called policy analysis.

A second romance views politics as an inefficient his-toric alternative to the rationality of markets. From thisperspective, water, for example, should be commodi-tized and not regarded as a public good. The so-calledrational choice approach, popular in political geogra-phy in the 1970s and still dominant in political scienceas a whole, focuses on how individual actors have no orlittle incentive to restrict consumption of public goodsand instead an incentive to avoid paying if at all possible(e.g., Sen 1977; Taylor 2006). The third, often taggedas radical, sees politics as a structurally determined pro-cess benefiting only those who can “pay to play.” Tosome in this camp, only by “being against” and trying todisrupt regular politics is there the possibility of any sortof popular progress. Otherwise, we must just all wait forsome sort of cataclysm to finally sort things out. In theinterim, radical critique substitutes for any interest inpractical politics per se. The fourth, a frequent elementin populist worldviews, sees politics in terms of con-spiracies whereby formal politics in particular is simplya mask for conspiratorial interests such as governmentofficials, arms manufacturers, or cabals of one sort or



another. A fifth sees the political arising as a conflictof friends and enemies between whom the possibility ofcompromise is impossible. Historically associated withthe political theology of extreme nationalists, this posi-tion has become more widely accepted, particularly bythose who see the world irremediably divided betweenirreconcilable and warring civilizations and cultural or-ders. Finally, increasingly influential are those idealistviews that interpret politics as deriving directly fromethics. This is not simply saying that political action(and studying political action) should be based on val-ues such as justice, liberty, or equality. Certainly, youcan argue that politics should be more about such goals.It is much more that the political becomes entirely thesearch for a historically, and geographically, invariantabstract justice. Anything else is “impure” and deficient.Practical politics is thereby dissolved.

In this setting I cannot possibly offer an adequatecritique of each of these positions. My main point hereis only to suggest that as typically expressed, these po-sitions all displace practical politics in the hunt foran overarching abstract principle of the political. Asa result, they all tend to pitch conflicts and disputesin terms of (1) known and fixed preferences, interests,or identities; (2) totally oppositional and warring in-dividuals or groups; and (3) zero-sum outcomes. AsClive Barnett (2008, 1637) said about some of theseapproaches, they “share a rather precious disdain forordinary politics, which is interpreted as the sceneof the forgetting or diminution of genuine politicalenergy . . . [and which] . . . is often taken to invalidateany and all concern with the sites and procedures ofordinary democratic politics, such as elections, parties,or parliamentary procedures.” They also fail to deal ad-equately with the difference between putatively demo-cratic and authoritarian politics, presuming either theequivalent victory of bureaucracy in both cases or thelack of any real distinction between them in other re-spects (see, e.g., Dixit 2010). The indeterminate natureof practical politics means that it is without a tran-scendental guarantee to produce preferred outcomes(Revault d’Allons 2010). In other words, the abstractperspectives all manage to put the political beyond thereach of practical democratic politics.

Practical Politics of Water Provision

How Water Politics Works

In short, I am arguing that politics is not about theapplication of some idealized theory as often claimed in

political philosophy but rather a practical activity. Forinstance, in almost any society there is the question,as Raymond Geuss (2008, 25) put it, of “Who <does>what to whom for whose benefit?” This draws attentionto the fact that politics is always about actual peoplewho could do or who are doing things that affect otherpeople. Obviously, some people have greater capacityto do things than do others. Political institutions mo-bilize bias in favor of those who have experience inusing them. They also favor those with greater lobby-ing capacity and seeming ability to produce presentlyfavored political–economic effects. Consider the waysin which the financial sector was favored in the UnitedStates and Britain from the 1980s until the onset ofthe global financial crisis in 2007 (Harvey 2010). Somepolitical institutions, such as the U.S. Senate, for ex-ample, are inherently passive by design and hostile topopular initiatives (Agnew 2005). Relevant knowledgeis not equally available. Many people remain radicallyuninformed about crucial matters and rely almost ex-clusively on commentators and various authorities (e.g.,Collins and Evans 2007). Some institutions within na-tional states (and some national states) are obviouslymore powerful than others. Bureaucracies have the ca-pacity to sideline or limit political participation becauseof their control over relevant information. Of course,part of practical politics also involves conflict over com-mitments to this or that political theory, however in-choately thought and expressed.

This focus leads to a second important feature of prac-tical politics: making choices between different coursesof action at a particular time, such as preferring policyA to policy B. Choices are made even in the absenceof much participation. If you want to make or influ-ence them, you must participate politically in someway, shape, or form, by voting, attending meetings,demonstrating, rioting, or striking (Geuss 2008). Delib-eration and participation are the ways in which voicesare heard. As these are social acts, a single voice isheard only if it is raised in the appropriate venue at theright time. Finally, politics invariably involves a socialmilieu in which certain courses of action are seen aslegitimate and others are not. These are what Geuss(2008, 36) called “warrants” for action that might ormight not be widely shared and that can change overtime. Politics is never simply about individuals follow-ing separate courses but about social influences affectingchoices and involving the relative mobilization of dif-ferent groups. Much of the modern history of politicshas been about the extension of participatory warrantsbeyond elite groups as the result of popular struggles


8 Agnew

over rights and control of the public sphere (Calhoun2010). Although there may be barriers to collective po-litical engagement, these need not prove disabling (e.g.,Abizadeh 2002; Neblo et al. 2010).

Taken together, these features define a view of pol-itics as a craft or skill involving “power, its acquisi-tion, distribution, and use” (Geuss 2008, 96). In thisconstruction, people only contingently apply ethicalprinciples in different contextual situations. They arethus open to compromise, even if ambivalently, as longas such compromises are judged as reasonably accept-able (Margalit 2010). From this perspective, politicsdoes not involve the blind application of normativerules that people always obey. It is always more cen-trally about pragmatic rules that are not so much about“whether a particular line of conduct is just or unjust,but about whether or not it will be effective” (Bailey2001, 6). Much modern literature in political scienceon non-zero-sum games points to how cooperation andnegotiation evolve even in the absence of formal com-munication (Axelrod 1984; Wright 2000). With com-munication these are even more readily facilitated. Asrecent experimental research using stylized models sug-gests, “Agents who evolve in most computational ex-periments are not blindly self-seeking but conditionallycooperative” (Poteete, Janssen, and Ostrom 2010, 192).Cooperation and negotiation engender the possibilityof compromise.

It would be naıve to pretend that politics, whetherstate oriented or not, formal or informal, is and al-ways is going to be equally central to everyone’s livesand that all are equally influential in it. People are en-tirely capable of being “good citizens” but often they arenot. Other social roles (parent, bread winner, consumer,etc.) might seem more urgent. But even when peoplemake little effort to inform themselves and then actconsequentially, they can still be competent to makedecisions that reflect a wider consensus (e.g., Mackie2003; Landemore and Elster 2010). People also oftenjudge quite rightly that political institutions are notopen to them. Typically, the ways people make sense oftheir everyday lives discourage them from either fullyparticipating politically or challenging the biases theyperceive as built into institutions; however, what Gram-sci (1957) called “contradictory consciousness” some-times enables people to notice as well as not notice theimpacts of politics on them and hence the possibilitythat they can act to change them. Even in a countrywith a clearly authoritarian government, such as con-temporary China, there are possibilities for politics thatneed emphasizing (e.g., Mertha 2008).

Some of the “lack” of interest in political participa-tion in more auspicious circumstances is undoubtedlydue to the absence of a language that connects personallives to the public sphere of politics (Eliasoph 1998).Indeed, much contemporary political language mimicsthat of marketing campaigns, TV and novelistic con-spiracy theories, wild-eyed religious ontologies aboutSatanic pacts and divine retribution, celebrity gossipmongering, and a personalizing of politics by narcissisticbloviators who never meet an ad hominem claim againstanyone believing in the possible efficacy of governmentthat they would hesitate to expound (e.g., Knight 2002;Salmon 2007; Frank 2009). Some of it, however, is alsodue to a lack of overlap between the spaces of everydaylife and those of political life, both formal and informal(Sewell 2001). There is a potential mismatch betweenhow politics is organized and how people live their lives(see, e.g., Barnett and Low 2004b). Much of the pro-duction of political apathy, though, is owed to whatseems to be the increasingly “managed” and performa-tive character of politics. According to Wolin (2008,136), such management signifies “the expansion of pri-vate (i.e. mainly corporate) power and the selectiveabandonment of governmental responsibility for thewell-being of the citizenry.” In other words, the politicalcontent of government is reduced in favor of privatizedadministration. Wolin provides a notorious George W.Bush quotation to secure his point that politics can bewindow dressing that serves antipolitical purposes: “Wesupport the election process, we support democracy, butthat doesn’t mean we have to support governments thatget elected as a result of democracy” (137).

Water politics illustrates the various attributes of thepractical conception of politics I have just sketched.Let me first take three distinctive examples at differentgeographical scales and then describe some of the chal-lenges that face democratic politics as a modus operandifor addressing the problem of water power. The first ex-ample, of interstate conflicts over access to river water,is provided by an analysis of the major political featuresof the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database ofaround 450 treaties compiled by Aaron Wolf and hiscollaborators (Wolf 1999, 2000; Wolf, Stahl, and Ma-comber 2003; Delli Priscoli and Wolf 2010). Counter-ing essentialized views of water conflicts that see themas necessarily escalating into full-blown warfare, Wolf(1998, 255) cannot find one example in looking at casesfrom 4,000 years of “a war fought over water.” Therehave certainly been many conflicts, but politics, notwar, has been the solution. In an extrapolation of thelessons learned from the negotiations over these treaties



to ethno-territorial conflicts, Cohen and Frank (2009)identified four characteristics of the riparian politics ex-amined by Wolf that have been crucial to negotiatedoutcomes. One is the fact that water lends itself to theidea that all sides have a need for it because of its central-ity to all life rather than simply that each side sees itselfas having a singular right to all the water provided by ariver flowing across or on the edge of its territory. An-other is that water can be shared, using temporal criteriasuch as periods of privileged access to river flow, thatcan then further diminish the zero-sum quality of thedispute. Third, all sides share a mutual interest in main-taining the multiple uses and overall quality of the watersupply. Thus, power generation, domestic water use, andirrigation use can be negotiated in terms of mutual bene-fit and sequence of use. Often, parties can have differentrankings of interest that might be best served by nego-tiating rather than through unilateral action. Finally, itis important to separate out the pragmatic and concretefocus on the water issues from broader ideological andterritorial claims. The linguistic and symbolic cast ofmost water treaties is to see water as a resource all par-ties need to varying degrees and must be shared in lightof local requirements and relative availability ratherthan solely in terms of wider nationalist or corporategoals.

A second example at a different geographical scaleis provided by Mullin’s (2009) fascinating recent studyof the public economy of water provision in the UnitedStates through a focus on the increased role of specialdistricts. She shows, in particular, that politics has re-placed the previous overriding emphasis on technologi-cal fixes to match household water supply and demand.This process has not happened suddenly but steadilysince the 1950s. Water provision has become an inher-ent element in the changing dynamics of the overallpolitics of economic growth. The decentralization ofU.S. water supply management is a response to boththe local politics of growth and the fact that “Popu-lation growth and redistribution have left water sys-tems throughout the country struggling to sate theircustomers’ thirst” (Mullin 2009, 10). On the basis of amajor empirical analysis of the workings of local waterdistricts around the United States, she argued, “Com-munities are beginning to develop strategies for man-aging existing resources more effectively as it becomesmore difficult to build their way out of water shortages”(Mullin 2009, 12). The whole political process involvedin adopting this approach to water management, how-ever, has been fraught from the outset. Major difficul-ties include competition with other users (agriculture,

electricity generation, etc.), deciding what each districtowes other communities reliant on the same surfaceor ground water sources, and resolving the various in-terests (water managers, environmentalists, consumers,etc.) who bring different agendas to the business of alllocal water districts. The opacity as opposed to trans-parency with which some of the special districts operateis crucial to the degree of bias built into decision mak-ing that favors some groups or places rather than others(e.g., Jepson 2010; also see McCulloch 2006, for a simi-lar argument about the politics of reservoir constructionin northeast England).

Finally, by way of example for a more intermediatescale, in the state of California, notorious these days forits dysfunctional state government, the state legislaturehas actually managed to produce legislation reorient-ing the ways in which water flows in California, withsome degree of agreement among most parties. It was adifficult task (Boxall 2009; Steinhauer 2009). Realizingtwo-thirds majorities in both houses of the state leg-islature is notoriously difficult. Last-minute votes wererounded up, as usual, by providing earmarks that ben-efit individual legislators and their electoral districts.Although the earmarks led to some condemnation ofthe bill from “political purists,” the alternative wouldhave been no bill passage whatsoever after years offailed attempts at confronting the state’s growing wa-ter problems. Although the bill is the first real attemptat upgrading California’s water system since the 1960s,it does nothing to address the broader dependency ofSouthern California on water from elsewhere in theAmerican West (Hundley 2009). Among a wide rangeof measures, the bill promises to accomplish the follow-ing: California will join other Western states in mon-itoring overall ground water elevations; it will reduceoverall urban per capita water usage by a fifth by 2020;and, most important, although without as high a pri-ority to conservation as local politicians in its vicinitywould have liked, it proposes funding (via a bond issue)of a new management system for the Sacramento Delta.This system is the source of a considerable amount ofthe within-state water that sustains both agriculturein the Central Valley and the urban areas of South-ern California. All sides, northerners and southerners,Central Valley Republicans and coastal Democrats, en-vironmentalists and farmers, gave ground to pass thelegislation. The bond issue to fund many of the pro-posed changes remains controversial and, subject topopular referendum, it could still fail (Skelton 2009;Hiltzik 2010). Then everyone will have to go back tothe drawing board.


10 Agnew

In short, politics, in California as elsewhere, is amessy business. The pressure of events has undoubt-edly contributed to a political climate conducive tonew initiatives. Water usage has been a critical issuein California for years, but the prospects of the possiblecollapse of the Delta ecosystem, three years of drought,and a federal court order to curtail pumping from theDelta to preserve a threatened species of fish (whichin turn led to a vast reduction in planted areas in theCentral Valley and unemployment among farm work-ers) helped to produce a peculiar coalition of interestsbroadly in favor of the new bill.

Challenges in the Politics of Water

These examples all suggest how politics is absolutelyintegral to the contemporary geography of waterprovision. What I have not spelled out are some of theemerging challenges to the geographical and institu-tional framing of the politics of water. I can only brieflydescribe the most compelling elements that are begin-ning to be addressed by geographers and others. Perhapsthe most obvious is the fact that water provision is anexample of the more general class of collective actionproblems that have typically been thought of in entirelyterritorial terms. Crucially, however, if the institutionaldomains within which most politics today operatesremain largely territorial by design, many of the dimen-sions of such problems are increasingly transnational ornetworked (Cerny 1995; Swyngedouw 2004; Brenner2009). Partly this transnational reach reflects the factthat transnational actors, particularly large firms, haveinterests that lead them to intervene outside theirstates of origin but, more important, they and otheractors create pressures for common or interchangeableinfrastructure across locations including that relating towater provision, thus changing the geographical scopefor political action beyond the confines of the nationalstate. Although the collective-action challenge canundoubtedly be exaggerated, whether argued in util-itarian (Cerny 1995), liberal cosmopolitan, or radicalbiopolitical terms (Chandler 2009), there is evidencethat the spaces of engagement surrounding particularenvironmental issues, such as waste management andwater provision, are changing with supranational tiersof government (and NGO networks). These tiers oftenempower lower levels over and against central gov-ernments (e.g., Bulkeley 2005; Birkenholtz 2009) butsometimes prove incapable of matching the legal andpolitical resources of big business (e.g., Whiteley andMasayesva 1998). Struggles to enlarge the participatory

possibilities of groups hitherto excluded from discussionand decision making about water provision need to beseen less in technocratic and more in political and eco-logical terms (e.g., Beck 1997; Ekers and Loftus 2008).

Another area of challenge concerns the precisemechanisms whereby the legitimacy of certain modesof cooperation in managing water provision is realized.From one viewpoint, cooperation to manage water pro-vision is a simple rational choice problem that can onlybe resolved by pricing water so as to make people revealtheir preferences and force collaboration. As many havepointed out, though, privatization of common resourcesreduces access to those who cannot pay the price, waterhas long had cultural meanings way beyond its char-acter as a resource, and socially cooperative solutionsare often more efficient than market ones (Tarot 2007;Heller 2008; Linton 2010; Schneier-Madanes 2010).From another perspective, as in Hardin’s (1968) 1960stough-guy intellectual “The Tragedy of the Commons,”only sanctions applied by some external power will suf-fice. Yet, as Ostrom (1998, 12) has pointed out in aninfluential argument, real social cooperation and thussuccessful management crucially depend on the expe-rience of face-to-face communication and, ipso facto,“the trust that individuals have in others, the invest-ment others make in trustworthy reputations, and theprobability that participants will use reciprocity norms.”Rather than seeing this behavioral nexus as sanctioninga single set of institutional arrangements, Ostrom looksto a range of institutional possibilities as long as we allacknowledge that “It is ordinary persons and citizenswho craft and sustain the workability of the institu-tions of everyday life” (18). Critical to this task will bedefining the appropriate communities in which socialrules for cooperation over any given issue can be ex-pected to prevail. These need not be communities ofpropinquity but they certainly need to involve a highdegree of face-to-face communication to fit the require-ments laid out by Ostrom and others (see, e.g., Meinzen-Dick 2007; Harrington, Curtis, and Black 2008; Randet al. 2009). Recent empirical studies that focus on therole of local community in the politics of water includeMacKillop and Boudreau’s (2008) examination of howin Los Angeles the water infrastructure has both re-flected and directed a politics of fragmented communi-ties between which social trust has been largely absent,Wang et al.’s (2009) examination of the roles of gov-ernments and farmers in the “water crisis” in northernChina, and Perreault’s (2008) focus on how “customarypractices” governing water allocation motivated largeprotests against the commodification of irrigation water



in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2000 and laid the ground-work for subsequent political action.

A further challenge involves incorporating thehierarchy of interstate relations into consideration ofthe geopolitics of water. Conventional internationalrelations theories, as Furlong (2006) has pointedout, are typically not very useful in examining waterconflicts because they presume either an actual or anormative equality in power between states (but alsosee Warner and Zetoun 2008). Indeed, some argue thatthe typical assumption of a strict match between stateterritory and sovereignty has become grossly misleadingin understanding the origins and course of many real-world conflicts (e.g., Agnew 2009; Luoma-Aho 2009).Even though riparian disputes between neighboringstates have often generated agreements and treaties, asnoted previously, there should not be a presumptionof equality between them in the capacity to affect out-comes. An emerging perspective on “hydro-hegemony”argues that much of what often goes for “agreement” isin fact the outcome of clear power differentials and thatwater is also subject to disputation because of the waysit is embedded in international food and agriculturaltrade as well as in direct conflicts over access towater sources (Allan 2001; Selby 2003; Warner andZetoun 2008). Studies such as those of Mumme (2008)on U.S.–Mexico cross-border water management,Feitelson and Fischhendler (2009) on the relationsbetween Israel and its neighbors on water issues, Harrisand Alatout (2010) on the role of water in the perfor-mance of nation-state building in Turkey and Israel,and Alam, Dione, and Jeffrey (2009) on sovereigntyand conflict over the Senegal River in West Africasuggest the importance of rethinking how we might ap-proach the geopolitics of water provision by explicitlyincorporating more realistic conceptions of sovereignty.

A challenge that pervades the entire study and prac-tice of water politics is how to consider the role ofexpert knowledge about water provision. Although “sci-ence” rarely seems to resolve policy debates (Keller2009), claims to expert knowledge permeate disputesover many environmental issues such as climate changeand water provision. Of course, “The problem with ex-perts is that they do not know what they do not know”(Taleb 2010, 147). But the belief in the “objective” anddeterminant character of scientific knowledge (partic-ularly consensus views) is frequently used as a rhetor-ical resource to justify this or that position. Yet, therehas been limited analysis of the ways in which scien-tific claims actually enter into policy making about wa-ter provision (see Holifield 2009). More particularly,

the role of individual experts in particular disputes hasnot been subject to much examination, and, as Budds(2009, 420) noted, “little attention has been paid tothe production of hydrological data, their use in pol-icy, and their role in changing waterscapes.” It is illu-sory, however, to think that experts are free of politicalviewpoints, tendencies to groupthink, and other flaws.Economist Robert J. Shiller recently said that he keptquiet in committee meetings at the New York Fed re-garding his growing misgivings about an emerging U.S.housing finance bubble because he was afraid that othereconomists would ostracize him for questioning ortho-dox opinion (McClay 2009). Nevertheless, scientificexpertise matters, not least because some have accessto it, whereas others do not (Whatmore 2009), andthe fatalism that its claims about incipient collapse orintractability sometimes engender might work againsteither seeing or stimulating popular political responses(Crist 2007; Woodson 2010).

Finally, the entire discussion about water politics(and practical water politics itself) is pervaded by alanguage that frames issues in ways that are often not ex-plicitly identified. Language is not a nonneutral mediumthat reflects reality as a simple-minded empiricismmight have it. It actively frames how we see and listento the world. In particular, language always has politicaluses (Kroskrity 2000). For example, water provisionis frequently explored using terms such as profligacyand scarcity (e.g., Rees 1982; Rijsberman 2006). Thisframing emphasizes water’s physical as opposed topolitical valuation. I have noted previously how wateritself is empowered when its physical association withsome places is given priority over others in tales aboutits environmental significance. Basic concepts in watermanagement, such as the “hydrological cycle” and“river-basin planning” (Molle 2009; Linton 2010), playcrucial roles in defining the basic parameters aroundwhich political disputes are played out. The discussionabout social trust and norms as necessary to adequateparticipatory politics is also often expressed in the lan-guage of “community,” one that deserves close scrutiny,not least because of its very own often reactionarypolitical connotations (Baker and Bartelson 2009).

Conclusion

If one contribution of this presentation is intended tohelp in what has been called the “re-naturing of politicalgeography” (Cox, Low, and Robinson 2008, 183–262),by focusing on a question of common interest to bothphysical and human geographers and of widely accepted


12 Agnew

contemporary global significance, a second is to ques-tion the overwhelming tendency either to reinstitutean environmental determinism or to establish a polit-ical “theoreticism” (Barnett and Low 2004a, 3) basedon an abstract or structural conception of “the political”as the best choices for understanding the geography ofwater provision. In their place I have made a case fora practical conception of politics as both a focus foranalyzing the actual ways in which water provision issubject to dispute and as a normative commitment toactively shaping the world through popular participa-tion. We have politics available to us and we need toinvigorate it. Recent history reminds us that awaitingan eschatological showdown in which every dilemmawe have ever faced will suddenly be resolved without or-ganized political mediation will likely disappoint. In hismarvelously discerning book about the virtues of prac-tical politics, In Defence of Politics, Crick (1993, 13)quoted Boris Pasternak’s great novel, Doctor Zhivago, tothis effect:

There are limits to everything. In all this time somethingdefinite should have been achieved. But it all turns outthat those who inspired the [Russian] revolution . . . aren’thappy with anything that’s on less than a world scale. Forthem, transitional periods, worlds in the making, are anend in themselves. . . . And do you know why these never-ending preparations are so futile? It’s because these menhaven’t any real capacities, they are incompetent. Man isborn to live not to prepare for life.

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Correspondence: Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095–1524, e-mail: [email protected].


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